A different perspective on Magnifica Humanitas from Samuel Gregg, who concentrates on the encyclical’s economic analysis. Gregg notes that Magnifica, like most Vatican statements on economics, seems to take it for granted that government programs can alleviate poverty and other social ills— although the evidence to support that confidence is conspicuously missing.

The encyclical also suggests that economic inequality is evidence of injustice: an oversimplification at best. And the text tacitly assumes that the world’s governments have adopted laissez-faire economic policies, when in fact government regulations are steadily increasing. Gregg argues:

Taken together, these facts illustrate that Adam Smith’s invisible hand is being increasingly restricted throughout the world by the state’s very visible and increasingly blunt hand. This is the economic story of our time to which MH’s drafters were apparently oblivious.

The moral of the story, Gregg writes, is that Vatican officials need to become better acquainted with economic perspectives from outside the comfortable confines of European liberalism.